Abstract
This study examines the discursive, pragmatic, and embodied features of Mayan infants' distress management, focusing on two infant crying events in so-called problem–remedy sequences (Kidwell, 2011). The analysis shows that haptic–soothing trajectories (Cekaite and Holm Kvist, 2017) are distributed across multiple caregivers in multiparty participation frameworks that culminate in breastfeeding, analyzed here as the soothing nursing niche. This niche constitutes a locus of co-operative emotional calibration through haptic, visual, vocal, and pragmatic engagement between mother and infant. The pragmatics of mother-infant soothing is co-constructed through prosodic alignments, question–answer adjacency pairs, prompting, directives, reframing, and inferences attributing accountability to specific phenomena. The soothing resources are aimed at prompting the infant's emotional, conversational, and pragmatic responsiveness. Two crying events involving a baby girl at 13 and at 22 months old are analyzed. The study is rooted in over three decades of anthropological and linguistic research in the Tzotzil Mayan community of Zinacantán, México.
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